Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday March 25, 2011 @06:32PM
from the you-can-run-but-you-can't-hide dept.

donniebaseball23 writes "Zynga's presence in mobile gaming is nowhere near its dominance of social gaming on Facebook, but according to chief designer Brian Reynolds, Zynga's looking to change that. '[Mobile] is something that we actively care about, think about. It's the major place where we think the future is,' Reynolds said, adding, 'The reason that Zynga isn't ginormous on mobile yet is because the friction of social networking is still high on mobile.'"

The funny thing on the iPhone their crappy "games", such as Mafia Wars, Street Racing, Vampires, etc. are not even real games. If you can't win nor lose, you don't have a game, you have a toy! Hell, you can't even "restart" if you want to try another "style"

I've been using PopCaps Bejeweled 2 for like forever. I enjoy playing it on my iPhone bettter than on the Facebook site, but with every "improvement" they've come up with, useability is terrible. Don't know if this is Zynga's or PopCap's fault, but it's harder to connect, harder to keep connected, and harder just to sign in with every new iteration. I liked the original version better because it was just easier to forget the mechanics and just play.

They've had at least one mobile title (Farmville) out for a few months, and despite numerous updates, it's so buggy as to be unplayable. I challenge you to find another game on iTunes that has as many bad reviews. Whether you like Zynga games or think they're the worst thing ever, you have to admit that a game so poorly coded doesn't have much of a future.

You can get away with some pretty crap games on Facebook because, well, it is games on Facebook. Move on to mobiles (especially new ones) and there is more tough competition. Doesn't mean that they won't sell anything, there is a market for all kinds of stuff, but it may well mean they don't sell very much.

If they want to succeed in the mobile market, they can't afford to be lazy when it comes to Android development. As it is, the Android version of Words With Friends is nothing but a shoddy port of the iPhone title. It's bloated, slow, has no real options, push notifications seldom work (if at all), chews through your battery life like it's a Sega GameGear even when running just the background service (God help you if you leave the actual interface running), and it doesn't even use the menu button properly (read; at all)...

If you work at Zynga you're all going to have farmville, etc. cause let's face it some of them have got to have like farm lvl1000 or whatever by now, but if an employee has a low level at their games or has a custy little farm with are they actually wrong in not playing on facebook all day or would you be expected to have a good upstanding farm the size of Iowa?

I bet they either a) haven't figured out how they can trick users into spamming all their friends with invites on mobile platforms or b) have figured it out, but the users (or users' friends) revolted.

At least as of a few months ago, Zynga obviously didn't get mobile. I used to be a huge Mafia Wars addict on Facebook. I played Mafia Wars for mobile for a while, but the mobile version wasn't connected to the Facebook version. Leveling up on one version did nothing to the other version, etc. It was pointle

"Social games are about expressing myself in front of my friends and part of the value of investing in the play is the fact that I know my friends are going to see my farm and I'm going to help them and all my friends are going to be there." - Brian Reynolds, Zynga's Chief Game Designer

This man is out of touch with reality. I know people who play Farmville, Cafe World, Mafia Wars and the like and their friends lists are full of people they don't know by any other means except they also play these games.

Slashdot is going crazy. The editors see the need to clarify obvious things, such as who was Alan Turing, but suddenly they post a piece about some obscure, facebook-specific crap and we're supposed to know about it?

Facebook and all that shit is conquering our internet, and we are doing nothing about it. it's just sad. This is worst than AOL.

I have a shiny Sony X10 Xperia touchphone, and I shudder to think how playing Farmville would even look or "feel" on this phone. It's one thing to have a 26" widescreen display and a mouse, it is a whole different world when you've got me... Fat Finger Freddy, trying to plow fields on a 5" touchscreen. Not to mention another challenge is, are they going to migrate every game into Java? Flash does not work on my phone and it not even an option to install (not that i'd want to, i'm perfectly happy without i